You probably don’t know this, but a team from the SA department of trade, industry & competition is in Washington at the moment to try to wrestle down the 30% tariff on imports from SA that US President Donald Trump imposed on us.
Try to imagine their horror on Wednesday as photographs emerged of the chief of the defence force, Rudzani Maphwanya, with the chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces in Tehran, Abdolrahim Mousavi, in a gilded hall, flags of both countries beside them. He was there “to enhance military co-operation” between SA and Iran.
I don’t know much about Gen Maphwanya, but he is either a fool or a saboteur. The Americans have just dropped hundreds of tonnes of advanced ordnance on Iran’s nuclear plants. They accuse SA of colluding with its enemies, very much including Iran. They have imposed a crippling 30% tariff on us and threaten more sanctions for a range of issues that have nothing to do with trade. And this guy goes to Tehran on business and in uniform. Because, you know, no-one tells us what to do.
Does the general need permission to travel? If so from whom? Defence minister Angie Motshekga? Does she know what she’s doing, or what he’s doing? Does President Cyril Ramaphosa? Did he sanction the trip?
Our government delegation in Washington, their arms full of plans and deals and goodwill, will have Rudzani’s photographs shoved under their noses when they meet their US counterparts, of that you can be sure. How do you explain it, even to US officials who may be disposed to helping you get something across the line with Trump?
No-one would be remotely surprised if Ramaphosa and his defence minister didn’t know about the trip. Ramaphosa’s government, always a tenuous affair, is now a shambles. The president can barely keep his party’s national executive committee together.
The least he could have done was tell the people around him to behave while we negotiate with the Americans, but if he has no-one told the army.
Faced with the most severe challenge imaginable to his national dialogue, instead of postponing its opening this Friday he instead plunges ahead in the vainglorious belief that he can save it. Instead, he will wreck it.
The decision by the main sociopolitical foundations behind the dialogue to withdraw last week entirely strips the dialogue of its legitimacy as a public and civil forum. It’s as if Ramaphosa had so much riding on it that he stopped reading the room. Normally painfully tentative, this time he has thrown caution to the wind, and the more determined he is to push on with it the more he and the ANC will be identified as its centre and the more certain will be its failure.
The whole affair might be his own undoing. The ANC is restive. The US tariffs will cause incalculable hardship in this country and he will be blamed, no matter how unfair that might be. The least he could have done was tell the people around him to behave while we negotiate with the Americans, but if he has no-one told the army.
There’s no reason to celebrate Ramaphosa’s crisis. The weaker he becomes the less he is able to direct his succession as ANC leader in 2027, and the more certain it makes his replacement by deputy president Paul Mashatile. And don’t be comforted by confident predictions of the ANC’s demise at the next local government or national elections. The party will do badly, but not badly enough.
What Ramaphosa should do now is the opposite of what Thabo Mbeki did when challenged for the ANC leadership by Jacob Zuma in 2007. Mbeki hung on, thinking he could win, and he didn’t. Ramaphosa should make clear soon that he will not be available for re-election as party leader and let someone else take on Mashatile and start running now.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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